Present value, p.39
Present Value, page 39
The hell with Fritz’s letters. She felt liberated from his criticism, too. She didn’t need to wait around for him anymore. Lord knows she’d tried hard enough. During that midnight drive back to Wellesley, she dressed Fritz down. Talk is cheap, Fritz, and a house in Dover isn’t!
The second tumble, while lacking the pure fire of the first one, was vigorous, at least. It was still exciting, and Linda still exulted. It was a chance to feel again, to be suddenly alive, when she’d been dead for so long. The only real problem was that Fritz still didn’t know about it.
There was, however, a frisson of embarrassment that second time. Philippe had a one-track mind—the moment he had his arm around you in greeting, he was unhooking your bra strap. That was gratifying enough, but afterward, the Shrill Small Voice returned to provide some color commentary. The Voice had recovered its equilibrium after the first heated rush and was now beginning to insinuate that maybe Philippe was just horny, and that he was rather young. The Voice was suggesting that people were going to say the whole thing made Linda appear ridiculous. “You do look silly,” said the Voice. Unlike Linda, the Voice had not been liberated from fear of criticism—indeed, the Voice was criticism.
“Silly?” Linda shot back. “I’ll give you silly. I have a husband in prison who wants Tinker Toys.” Exercising new independence, Linda gained strength to give the Voice the brush-off, at least on the Philippe question. The hell with criticism, Linda thought: it served Fritz right.
It was funny how Fritz kept popping into her mind during those late-night drives back to Wellesley.
But the Voice kept after her. “So which part of that conversation did we find intellectually satisfying?” asked the Voice after one date with Philippe. “And why are we driving back to Wellesley? Why isn’t he in Wellesley driving back to Boston? Why are we keeping him away from Michael and Kristin?”
Count on the Voice to pose a tough question. Even though a piece of Linda came back petulantly (why couldn’t the Voice just back off, let her have a little fun?), another piece of Linda began to wobble. Honestly, what am I doing? She occasionally wondered. The third tumble had been lackluster and ho-hum, it was true. He was snoring within seconds. And this business of Philippe rolling over while she had to get herself up and out of the city and back to her children—it gave Linda a moment or two of genuine nagging self-doubt.
The Voice had gained a couple of sets, but Linda rallied. What was the alternative? Philippe was an artist. He was tired. He’d been firing a kiln, and that was demanding work. Her “serves Fritz right” side scored a few more points of this kind, and by the time she reached home, that side had prevailed in a wearisome tiebreaker. No longer exultant, perhaps, Linda nevertheless was grimly determined to go forward with this. Although she wouldn’t admit it, part of her worried about Fritz’s return and searched out a Rubicon to cross before he showed up on her doorstep again. Why not this one? Philippe was youthful and interesting (or, if not interesting per se, interesting to look at), he seemed smitten (at a minimum, horny), and the accounts for his art gallery were in serious need of attention. Linda needed a project. Why not this project as much as any other?
The Voice remained critical. As far as it was concerned, Philippe was available, that was all, and Linda had a history: there was never even a brief hiatus between her men. She had to go directly from one to the next. Remember Stanley? “What is with you that you can’t be without a man for two seconds?” the Voice demanded.
“Is a little comfort and understanding too much to ask for? With all I’m going through right now?” Linda rejoined.
“You should have higher standards.”
“Oh, shush,” said Linda to the Voice.
LINDA’S LONELINESS wouldn’t go away. The Philippe business was an occasional rush, but it didn’t cure the loneliness, because she couldn’t even begin to bring him into her real life. There were no more work colleagues, her old friends were dying to get together but busy just at the minute, the kids were embittered and distant, and she didn’t have a regular companion in life anymore.
Michael wasn’t making friends at Wellesley High. Nobody came back after school to the McHouse with him, and he wasn’t off to friends’ houses, either. Every day at 2:45 he walked in the door alone, guzzled milk from the fridge, and went to his room.
Kristin was doing all right at Chaney, but at home all she did was sit in her room, watching music videos and reading Glamour. A typical conversation would go something like this:
“Good morning, honey!”
Silence.
“How’d you sleep, okay?”
A glower. “Fine.”
“Are you still working with Amy on that science project?”
“Mother, I told you yesterday.”
“Honey, I don’t know if that top isn’t a little—”
SLAM.
Like all good mothers, Linda snooped diligently through her daughter’s things. (Good suburban mothers and daughters had evolved an elaborate communication ritual. Things too awkward to say to one’s mother were written into journals or other private records and hidden for mother to find. Daughter knew she was writing for mother, mother knew that daughter knew, but mother and daughter would never acknowledge what was going on.) Linda soon discovered that Kristin kept her father’s letters under her pillow in a bundle tied up with a red ribbon. Most mornings, after the kids had gone off to school, Linda would go to Kristin’s room. Sometimes she even curled up on the Laura Ashley coverlet on her daughter’s bed, untying the ribbon and reading Fritz’s letters, hearing his voice again. On the small writing desk, Linda would prospect for Kristin’s half-completed compositions. They almost burst with all the chatty girlishness that Linda now never heard and so longed for. It occasionally upset her to see smiley faces and hearts dotting every i, and to think that she never got that kind of affection anymore; but a bigger Linda, a better Linda, was reassured. It meant that part of the old Kristin was still there, and that lifted Linda’s spirits, even if she had somehow lost that relationship with Kristin herself.
She was even calling him Daddy again.
Thus a strange virtual correspondence developed. Linda rarely wrote to Fritz, and she didn’t even read his letters to her closely. But she lingered lovingly over every word he wrote to their daughter, then over the words Kristin wrote back. A smile would play across her face, and her eyes might tear. Curling up in the bed like a little girl, she occasionally dropped her guard enough to indulge the fancy that she missed Fritz herself.
33 GAME OVER
BACK IN NOVEMBER OF 2001, during the first days, you could almost smell it in the Wilmington air: the savor of a succulent joint of meat, crackling with fat, oozing with juice. Playtime was a huge roast, one of the hugest ever seen, and it would bear millions of carvings for the professionals before anyone noticed. So they all thought, at the beginning.
“Carve out” was a favorite expression of the bankruptcy lawyers: it referred to that part of the roast reserved for their fees. In a case like Playtime, scores of knives were sharpened—knives of lawyers and accountants and investment bankers and appraisers and financial advisers and restructuring specialists; there were counsel and local counsel and special counsel. That was a lot of carnivores, and it meant a lot of carving.
But there was plenty of marbled beef for all, everyone thought, plenty for heaping second helpings. Because at the beginning, they figured Playtime needed only the security of bankruptcy to get the Asians shipping. Once that happened, the toy business would get the jump start it needed. It may have sounded odd to talk of security and bankruptcy in the same breath, but it was true: a court watching over a company usually gives the vendors confidence. The Asians would get court orders to say that their Action Men would be paid for, they would ship, the toy chains would buy, and the roast would continue to turn on the spit.
That’s what everyone thought.
Things were bad at the VD unit, but people figured those losses wouldn’t drag down the rest of the company. The heart of the VD unit consisted of young men from San Mateo and Seattle with pierced tongues and goatees and poor hygiene, with Birkenstocks on their feet and dreadlocks on their heads, young men in their twenties who understood two things: software and stock options. (Some of the artists were women, but artists weren’t as hard to come by as programmers. Only the rarest of women had much interest in cranking out the miles and miles of computer DNA necessary to bring gore to life in games like Death Vault.) These young men didn’t know anything about bankruptcy other than it put their options out of the money, but that was all they needed to know. As soon as their options disappeared, they disappeared, vanishing like Bedouins in the night, leaving screen savers tracking across their computers and cold cups of Starbucks by the keyboards. The unit still had contracts and licenses and patents, it still had leases and office equipment and computers, and it still had games in development. But without the twenty-four-year-olds, the VD unit was toast.
No big deal, thought the lawyers at first. The hell with the VD unit. The rest of the company—the strollers and Action Men and Big Trikes and Bad Boyz and Boobie dolls—why, that was a Manningtree ox. So when this horde of fee carvers smelled the joint of roast meat on the table, when they got a whiff of its aroma, their saliva glands took over. The negotiations escalated to motions, the motions to court fights, all over the subject of who could carve what. While the professionals were busy carving and brawling, something far more important was happening, far from Delaware. It was happening half a globe away, where Herman Trabbert had organized a tour.
Herman Trabbert rarely left the northern suburbs of Kansas City, Missouri. Those suburbs contained all of the key institutions of Herman’s life: his home on River Terrace, Zion Baptist Church, where he was a deacon and elder on the stewardship committee, and the world headquarters of International Leisure, where Herman was chairman. Since that wonderful day when his chief competitor had erupted in flames, he often thought about bidding for a piece of Playtime’s business. He’d even had some investment bankers look at it. But one Sunday afternoon in Advent, after services, he took his usual roast pork dinner with his wife, Carol Ann, and then his usual nap in front of the television. It was later that afternoon, while watching a football game, that God gave Herman Trabbert a revelation. The Kansas City Chiefs had an end named Juwon Brown whose pass catching had terrorized the league, but for some reason, the Chiefs weren’t throwing the ball to him. “They’ve got to get him the ball,” the announcers kept saying. “Juwon Brown may be the best split end in football, but if the Chiefs don’t get Juwon Brown the ball, Juwon doesn’t hurt you!”
Herman Trabbert smiled. He had conceived his plan. You didn’t need to beat Juwon Brown. Or trade for him. As long as Juwon doesn’t get the ball, Juwon doesn’t hurt you.
The next spring, a team that might have been made in Herman Trabbert’s own image, looking for all the world like a half-dozen Bible salesmen, was dispatched from Kansas City to the Far East. They went canvassing China and Malaysia and Korea, gathering Chinese and Malaysians and Koreans into conference rooms, shutting the doors behind them, then preaching about hellfire and damnation: specifically, how damned American bankruptcy was—particularly for foreigners.
In hushed and fearful tones, Herman’s team asked, “How much exposure do you have to Playtime?”
What did this mean? The Asians knew their receivables were iffy, but they’d been told they’d be paid for any new shipments. There was no problem with that.
The Bible salesmen shook their heads. “You think some American bankruptcy judge is going to favor you above the American creditors? I’m afraid they just want your Action Men.”
“We have coat odor! We have coat odor!” the Asian manufacturers protested.
But the International Leisure team sighed and rubbed their hands, sorry to have to bring this news. They looked around the table at one another and wondered how their fellow Americans could have been so perfidious with these poor Chinese and Malaysians and Koreans. To have so flagrantly misled them about the perils of doing business with a bankrupt—why, it was a scandal, that’s what. “Is that what they told you?” they asked.
“We have coat odor!”
The gentlemen from Missouri asked very gently and kindly to see it. They read with interest the photocopies of the court papers signed by Judge Shoughler. Then they nodded gravely and, in low, compassionate voices, asked, “They said these would get you paid?”
“Is signed by judge!”
Was there no depth to which Playtime would not sink? “We’re afraid,” said the lead Bible salesman, “that this court order isn’t worth the price of the fax paper. Not to foreigners. See where it refers to vendors in here? Vendors will be paid in the ordinary course and so forth? That’s American vendors. It’s a nuance of the case law.”
This was the cue for the deputy Bible salesman who was in fact the traveling attorney to nod sagely. “Galardi versus Hanks,” he said. “A case decided under section three-oh-four of the bankruptcy code.”
Nods all around.
“Right,” the leader added. “Galardi. It’s their secret weapon. Didn’t they tell you about Galardi?”
The Chinese or the Malaysians or the Koreans, as the case might be, exchanged helpless glances. No one had told them about this Galardi. The Chinese and the Malaysians and the Koreans were stunned by this news, this dreadful perfidy, this hidden trick of the Americans. What could they do?
“We’re here to help,” said the men from Kansas City, smiling. “We’ll take your Action Men.”
“You have coat odor?”
“Even better.” Out of their satchels the Bible salesmen pulled their gleaming file folders, and spread them on the table, and fished from them the crisp documentary letters of credit. With the stamps and seals and everything.
“Ooh,” said the Chinese and the Koreans and the Malaysians. “Citibank.”
Citibank was better, much better, than a court order. In the Far East, hands were shaken, and containers of Action Men contracted for shipment, and dinner was ordered, and then drinks (which the Bible salesmen politely declined), then more drinks (which they declined again). And then the smiling Missouri entourage moved on. City by city, they picked off Playtime’s suppliers.
And so while the lawyers in Delaware were bawling about carve-outs, and filing papers, and arguing in court, and charging $600 an hour to harangue one another on the telephone, six gentle Bible salesmen from Missouri were driving a stake right through Playtime’s thorax. But nobody noticed until the fall, and by then it was too late.
ONE SATURDAY in October, Linda at last drove Michael to FPC Deer Path to see his father. Michael’s brooding had become so intense that maybe it would do him some good to see Fritz, she thought. At least it would get him off the computer for a day. Linda couldn’t understand why Fritz insisted on seeing Michael rather than Kristin, when it was she who so longed for her father, but Linda secretly agreed it was for the best.
It didn’t look like prison to Linda as she steered the Navigator up the drive. The fields had been mowed that morning, and the lawn tractors had blown the fallen leaves into big drums, and the smell of autumn suffused the air. The place looked more like a campus on top of a hill. Where were the high concrete walls, ugly yellow and topped with barbed wire? (“Just like Fritz,” the Shrill Small Voice commented, “to get sentenced to a country club!”)
“This doesn’t look so bad,” Michael said.
They parked and entered the lobby, and then there were forms to fill out at the desk. Michael waited nervously, trying not to catch the eye of any of the other visitors. They were women, mostly.
“Come with me, son,” said a heavyset man in a gray uniform carrying a big set of keys and a walkie-talkie. It was one P.M. Michael followed him through a set of double doors, leaving Linda behind. The doors swung shut, and Michael began to grow alarmed. Squeak-squeak-squeak went the guard’s shoes as he led Michael down the hall to the visitors’ room.
His dad was waiting at a table.
Where was the jumpsuit with the number on it? His dad was wearing all beige, but the shirt was the button-down kind. There were dozens of tables scattered around, and most of them had on one side a guy who looked like a dad, and on the other a visitor who looked like a mom. The visitors were all women except for Michael and this one old man who’d come with an old lady. They were speaking softly. But Michael was the only kid in the room.
Fritz stood when his son was led in. Michael seemed lankier than Fritz had remembered. He hugged the boy, who hugged back as perfunctorily as he could before sitting. Michael was all in black—black cargo pants, black Vans sneakers, black T-shirt with the logo of the rock band Stiletto on the front. Along his jawbone and under his sideburns grew the first hint of a dark furze. Michael sat at the table across from his father, averting his eyes.
“How’ve you been, son?”
“Fine.” Michael’s voice honked a little.
“You’re taller.”
“I guess so.”
Michael felt his father examining him in that way that embarrassed him so much. Michael had worn, in addition to the T-shirt and cargo pants, his adolescent carapace for the visit. He’d retracted his neck, turtle fashion, so it was almost with the hooded eyes of an amphibian that he peered out, occasionally regarding Fritz from protective cover. But the shell was thinner, and that vulnerable boy more visible, than Fritz could remember having seen in years.
“This doesn’t seem so bad,” Michael honked again, trying to sound adult.
“It doesn’t?”
